The Minister for Family of the Papal Government, Cardinal Antonelli, told me a few days ago in Zaragoza that UNESCO has a program for the next 20 years to make half the world population homosexual. To do this they have distinct programs, and will continue to implant the ideology that is already present in our schools.

The Mercedes-Benz Luton van can carry a volume of up to 20 cubic metres

All the gold that has ever been mined-- some 166,000 [metric] tonnes of it-- could fit into a crate measuring 20 cubic metres [706.29333443 cubic feet].... and the other thing about gold is that almost all of the metal that has been mined still exists... So if you hold a piece of gold in your hand, chances that it was once smelted by the Incas, or was part of a buckle on a Roman centurion's sword melted down after the collapse of the Roman empire....

--Stephen Robinson, quoting Tony Dobra, a director of Baird & Co., gold dealer and smelter in the U.K., in "How to keep your money safe and make even more of it*), in Tatler, November 2011

The president instructed us that nothing we would do
would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the
Convention Against Torture. And so, by definition, if it was authorized
by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the
Convention Against Torture.

"Was it torture? I don't believe it was torture," [Vice President Dick Cheney] told the Washington Times on Monday, a week after the release of a unanimous Senate report concluding that the policies Cheney initiated were indeed torture. In fact, the Senate Committee concluded that the model for the Cheney-Bush interrogation policy was the torture practices of the Chinese communists during the Korean War....Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who was [former Secretary of State under George W. Bush] Colin Powell's chief of staff, ...stated unequivocally that Cheney was the primary author of the torture policy.

Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.

Update, 2 December 2008. President George W. Bush in interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News: I was unprepared for war....the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq....you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Mr. Gibson: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

Mr. Bush: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the
inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were
being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass
destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

Mr. Gibson: No, if you had known he didn’t.

Mr. Bush: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do.

In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.

--Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788)